Now...this

I have always found an underlining conflict in cinema between the poetic and the factual, between making film attractive and making it true. What if the ornamentation of narrative was removed; leaving only the floating fragments of time, exposing some areas and hiding others until our perceptions of the image reveal as much as they conceal?

The beauty of cinema has become reduced to disjointed imagery; brief moments that pass on the side of a bus or within the pages of a magazine, adverts on television that sell time in seconds. It is common to feel a sense of familiarity with a film without ever having the need to experience it. Time becomes of paramount importance over the seductive image, our escapism, and our lives in general. Scenes within films that are longer than a few minutes are seen as arduous by critics, the apparent agitation of those shuffling in their seats are a result of the fast paced consumption of entertainment.

I produce large scale projections housed in darkened spaces; my current work titled Now...this is filmed solely using DSLR cameras. Primarily used for a photographic purpose the DSLR capture is instantaneous, lacking in the tangible tradition of celluloid film. It loses its patience. I make use of near static imagery as a vehicle for questioning the role of time, the nature of the cinematic as a living present and the photographic as that of a fixed past.

It proves difficult to digest imagery as a whole. At a glance we shift from picture to picture without ever having access to either, and they become unattainable. On the most apparent level we all expect films to be narrative. We assume that the director has observed a place, a person, an event in the world and wanted to record it. The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense. They activate only that which lies dormant within the spectator.